Tuesday, March 09, 2010

The plan to develop a parallel track has encountered a serious obstacle however: the ongoing feud between imperative and lambda calculus programmers.The debate is too abstruse to register in most magazines and journals directed at a popular audience, however administrators and would-be funding sources pick up on the negative vibe, the sense of an altercation, and withhold the necessary energy investments.

We all suffer as a result.

In the old days, when a metaphysical blood clot of this magnitude developed so close to the heart, you'd have teams of philosophers, well-read across disciplines, descending upon the scene and insisting that common ground be discovered, that the logjam be removed.

These days, however, the fact that Leibniz dreamed of computer programming languages is mostly forgotten, and academic philosophers get away with not caring about anything so central to computer science. Their favorite flavors of logic miss that boat entirely.My frustration level is high on this score, as my "freedom train" of polyhedra, including the volume six rhombic dodecahedron, was supposed to run along this track, blessing it with our concentric hierarchy of core relevance, our signature matrix, our geometrical relationships bonanza.

Should we implement polyhedra as objects? Might we use Python? The functional programmers cry foul. The necessary reforms do not occur. Another day goes by when we could have been investing instead of squandering. The clock keeps ticking, the meter keeps running, as our shared heritage is withheld. What's dammed here is not just technical content, but lore.

Or would a simple turtle, drawing a plane-net for the T-module maybe be OK? What do the philosophers say? Do they say anything? Is there a philosopher in the house?